Top 500 R.F. Kuang Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “If you hold the fate of the country in your hands, if you have accepted your obligation to your people, then your life ceases to be your own.”

— R.F. Kuang

452. “I’m not someone for you to use.”

— R.F. Kuang

453. “The world was simpler when all that existed was what you could perceive in front of you. Easier to forget the underlying forces that constructed the dream. Easier to believe that reality existed only on one plane.”

— R.F. Kuang

454. “They’ll make you an outsider, because you’re not like them. That’s okay. Don’t let any of that discourage you. No matter what they say, you deserve to be here.”

— R.F. Kuang

455. “She stared up at the ceiling, trying to will her racing heartbeat to slow down. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong – a deep seated discomfort that wasn’t just the absence of rolling waves.”

— R.F. Kuang

456. “She woke up chanting classical analects, which terrified Kesegi, who thought she had been possessed by ghosts. And in a way, she had been – she dreamed of ancient poems by long dead voices and woke up shaking from nightmares where she’d got them wrong.”

— R.F. Kuang

457. “This is what you have to tell yourself,” Qara said fiercely. “You have to believe that it was necessary. That it stopped something worse. And even if it wasn’t, it’s the lie we’ll tell ourselves, starting today and every day afterward. You made your choice. There’s nothing you can do about it now. It’s over.”

— R.F. Kuang

458. “She herself found the dialect nearly indecipherable; every word, it seemed, had to be shortened, with a curt r noise added to the end.”

— R.F. Kuang

459. “Very good. I’ll have that sorted. In the meantime, I suggest you all calm down.’ He paused, turned around, and gave them a warm smile. After the week they’d just had, the sight of Anthony’s face in the soft candlelight made Robin want to cry with relief. ‘You’re in safe hands now. I agree it’s quite dire, but we can’t solve anything in this tunnel. You’ve done very well, and I imagine you’re quite scared, but you can relax now. The grown-ups are here.”

— R.F. Kuang

460. “I have a name,’ said the boy. ‘It’s – ’ ‘No, that won’t do. No Englishman can pronounce that. Did Miss Slate give you a name?”

— R.F. Kuang

461. “We’re sitting here because we’re already barely tolerated, and because as long as we don’t move too quickly or speak too loudly, we can blend into the background or at least pretend to be serving staff. That’s how this works, Letty. A brown man at an Oxford ball is a fun curiosity as long as he keeps to himself and manages not to offend anyone, but if I dance with you, then someone’s going to hit me, or worse.”

— R.F. Kuang

462. “He made some gestures with his hands that clarified nothing.”

— R.F. Kuang

463. “The great empires of the waking world were driven so mad by what they had forgotten that they decided to slaughter the only people who could still dream.”

— R.F. Kuang

464. “I dub historical exploitation novels: inauthentic stories that use troubled pasts as an entertaining set piece for white entertainment.”

— R.F. Kuang

465. “I don’t need to impress him. I’m impressive enough as is.”

— R.F. Kuang

466. “I don’t feel the same black, suffocating loss I did when my father died. I don’t struggle to breathe. I don’t lie awake in the mornings debating whether it’s worth crawling out of bed. I don’t resent every stranger I encounter, wondering how they can keep moving around the world as if it hasn’t stopped turning.”

— R.F. Kuang

467. “Because I don’t dream in chinese.”

— R.F. Kuang

468. “It’s about wishing you know who your parents were. It’s about needing things from your parents you’ll never get. When you’re in the zone, drafting doesn’t feel like an effortful artifice. It feels like remembering, putting down in written form something that has been locked inside you all along.”

— R.F. Kuang

469. “Because if she could just erase her past, then she could write herself into whoever she wanted to be in the present. Student. Scholar. Soldier. Anything except who she used to be.”

— R.F. Kuang

470. “She liked listening to Nezha talk. He was so hopeful, so optimistic, and so stupid.”

— R.F. Kuang

471. “But eventually, you’ll have to ask yourself precisely what you’re fighting for. And you’ll have to find a reason to live past vengeance.”

— R.F. Kuang

472. “Call off your men, or I will summon into existence things that should not be in this world.”

— R.F. Kuang

473. “If they couldn’t capture the Autumn Palace, at least they had a good chance of blowing it up.”

— R.F. Kuang

474. “New words in English were a game to him, for in understanding the word he always came to understand something about English history or culture itself. He delighted when common words were, unexpectedly, formed from other words he knew. Hussy was a compound of house and wife. Holiday was a compound of holy and day. Bedlam came, implausibly, from Bethlehem. Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you.”

— R.F. Kuang

475. “The Seer took his hand. Brought it to his lips and kissed it.”

— R.F. Kuang

476. “Then their fingers met, and she had a body again, and she could feel, feel his hands cup her cheeks and his forehead press against hers. She felt it acutely when he grasped her shoulders and shook her, hard. “Wake up,” he said. “You’re going to drown.”

— R.F. Kuang

477. “All prayer is simply repetition – a imposition of your demands upon the gods. The difference between shamans and everyone else is that our prayers actually work.”

— R.F. Kuang

478. “She burned away the part of her that would have felt remorse for those deaths, because if she felt them, if she felt each and every single one of them, it would have torn her apart.”

— R.F. Kuang

479. “Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re keys to civilizations. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.”

— R.F. Kuang

480. “The Nikara practiced these rituals regardless, went through the motions because there was comfort in doing so, because it was a way for them to express their anxieties about the ebbs and flows of their fortunes.”

— R.F. Kuang

481. “Anger, pain, and hatred – that was all kindling for a great and terrible power, and it had been festering in the south for a very long time.”

— R.F. Kuang

482. “Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine hot the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.”

— R.F. Kuang

483. “The problem is that we’re always living like we’re lost.”

— R.F. Kuang

484. “The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.”

— R.F. Kuang

485. “It’s like pressing a bleeding sore repeatedly, trying to see how far you can go with your tolerance for pain, because if you know the limits of it, you gain some sense of control over it.”

— R.F. Kuang

486. “We have one of those skin-deep friendships where you manage to spend a lot of time together without really getting to know the other person.”

— R.F. Kuang

487. “He could read the language better than he spoke it. Ever since the boy turned four, he had received a large parcel twice a year filled entirely with books written in English. The return address was a residence in Hampstead just outside London – a place Miss Betty seemed unfamiliar with, and which the boy of course knew nothing about.”

— R.F. Kuang

488. “And they don’t get that film is a totally different medium, and requires different storytelling skills,” says Justin. “It’s a translation, really. And translation across mediums is inherently unfaithful to some extent. Roland Barthes. An act of translation is an act of betrayal.”

— R.F. Kuang

489. “I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses.”

— R.F. Kuang

490. “Well – since in the Bible, God split mankind apart. And I wonder if – if the purpose of translation, then, is to bring mankind back together. If we translate to – I don’t know, bring about that paradise again, on earth, between nations.’ Professor Playfair looked baffled by this. But quickly his features reassembled into a sprightly beam. ‘Well, of course. Such is the project of empire – and why, therefore, we translate at the pleasure of the Crown.”

— R.F. Kuang

491. “She’d been so stupid to once think that if she ended the Federation then she’d ended the hurting. War didn’t end, not so cleanly – it just kept building up in little hurts that piled on one another until they exploded afresh into raw new wounds.”

— R.F. Kuang

492. “It’s as if – you know how when you’re ill for a long time, you forget how it feels to be healthy? You get used to your head ringing, your ears being blocked, or your nose being stuffed – and you don’t even notice you’re not right anymore. Until you are.”

— R.F. Kuang

493. “The national quest to modernize and mobilize entails a faith in one’s ability to control world order, and when that happens, you lose your connection with the gods. When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.”

— R.F. Kuang

494. “She wanted to forget everything, to forget the war, to forget her gods. It was enough to simply be, to know that her friends were alive and that the entire world was not so dark after all.”

— R.F. Kuang

495. “I don’t want to be saved!” Rin shrieked. “I want power! I want Altan’s power! I want to be the most powerful shaman there ever was, so that there is no one I can’t save!”

— R.F. Kuang

496. “That’s your key to the gods. Hold that in your mind and never forget the way you’re feeling right now. That’s what gives you power. And that’s what is going to keep you human.”

— R.F. Kuang

497. “So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. Genesis 11:8–9, Revised Standard Version.”

— R.F. Kuang

498. “He learned that being English was not the same as being British, though he was still hard-pressed to articulate the difference between the two.”

— R.F. Kuang

499. “You know what I mean,’ she huffed. ‘She’s not Haitian. She’s French. And I just don’t see why she has to be so difficult.”

— R.F. Kuang

500. “There are so many battles to be fought, so many fights on so many fronts – in India, in China, in the Americas – all linked together by the same drive to exploit that which is not white and English.”

— R.F. Kuang